If you purchased an HTC EVO 3D with HBOOT 1.50 right out of the box, or you held off rooting it thinking Revolutionary.io was still solid for the latest OTA, you might think you've been stuck with a half-rootable phone.

It appears, though, that having S-ON only means the kernel image cannot be tampered with in normal recovery. There are methods of launching recovery from fastboot by which I have successfully flashed a kernel and a ROM together, but until now flashing a kernel alone has been a bit of a task.

Flash Image GUI will flash an image at a different level than recovery, cutting out the need to boot into fastboot then force a recovery load via command line. Evidently the trick here is the only time S-ON matters is at the lower/boot levels of the OS (either that or I'm reading the entire thing wrong).

You can download the program for free here, but consider showing some support by purchasing it from the Market if it works for you. It takes developers a lot of time and work to figure these things out, and Bawls Soda ain't cheap.

Try it and let us know if it works for you. As usual, make sure to create a Nandroid backup before doing anything root. Oh, and this app also works for boot logos, flashing recoveries, etc.

About the Author

Paul King may be the last remaining editor at Pocketables. His articles are generally about HTC lines of products and all the neat things you can do with them. When not writing about them, he's riding a motorcycle, spending time with his wife, kids, and cats, or working as an IT manager at a film production company.

on an unlocked HTC EVO 3D, done by the official htcdev.com method which leaves the bootloader unlocked but S-ON, you can flash ROMs, Kernels, Boot screens, and anything else that a standard recovery can do, except not in recovery mode.

Same if you’ve got S-OFF/unlocked via Revolutionary.io. The neat thing was that S-ON people can do everything S-OFF could, except in a different location.

However, if you flash something the disagrees with the OS and can’t boot your phone back up, you really need to know how to use recovery from recovery mode.

With TWRP 2.0 not being too far out (graphical recovery) if you’re uncomfortable with recovery mode you might want to wait.

As a note, I’ve now flashed multiple kernels using FIGUI – they have all *stuck* – all report correct kernel, no weird wifi/4g issues.

Unlocked using HTCDev when I had 1.50. Boot shows Unlocked / S-ON.

Well, that’s solved now ;)

Chris

What Kernel are you successfully running? I flashed the (ROM)Steal25 InbREDed ODEXED V3.1.2; however, after flashing it I kept getting an error when attempting to connect to wifi. So I had to flash a stock kernel.

do you think revolutionary will come out with a quick unlock method for 1.50? Or do you think it is worth it to unlock viz HTCdev method? I really wanna root but having my phone marked in the system seems iffy to me

I think eventually they or someone else will, but since Gingerbread’s hboot on the evo timeframes are getting longer.

HTCDev’s method works, worst case scenario the phone breaks and they claim it was my fault due to unlocking and I say “screw you HTC” and become the first person on the internet to get turned down for a valid HTC repair.

Seriously been trying to find anyone who got turned down for a valid repair.

Frank

I think HTC’s slightly convoluted and limited approach to unlocking had the intended consequence of scaring away those people that wouldn’t do a proper amount of research and really shouldn’t be messing around with root privileges, etc. Thus, it’s far less likely that those who do use their method would brick their phones.

The biggest concern carriers have always had with regards to unlocked bootloaders and that sorta thing has always been the extra strain it puts on the supply and support chain, not tethering or anything like that (for which you don’t even need root in many cases). If they made unlocking too simple or fully fleshed out the unlock they’d be asking for trouble tbh.

If HTC was worried about that, all they would have to do is create a restore program (ala a RUU) or add a recovery partition to the phone (like a factory restore partition on a dell.)

They tried to hold control because the carriers demanded it (tethering, services that you can get for free that directly compete with the carrier’s $30 a month scheme, etc) nobody is going to pay extremely overpriced rates for a service they can get by running a 1-click.

They also want to be able to include their bloat/spyware on everything so they get money from the spammers that are preinstalled on your phone.

Recovery mode you’re used to executes programs located in /system/bin (I think) to install ROMs. In some cases it changes an image that’s in memory and then has to commit it to the NAND (flash memory). This is what NAND-unlocked means – you can write.

FIGUI executes the same programs recovery does, in the same general order. It leaves your system an unstable mess until you reboot (you just did brain surgery, it’s got to reload the brain).

There are some drawbacks to this – one being that you cannot back up a file that is in use – IE make a nandroid. Another, which was evidently the cause of removing a feature, is that you cannot write a file that is currently in use (you’ll notice the option to flash other mods was removed in the version released last night.

It works extremely well with most kernels, I say most because it was found that Ziggy’s Dual Core kernel was writing to system binary files / making it not quite right on install. It flashed the kernel and all, but one of the files it was trying to mod went a bit wonky.

So yeah, think of recovery as a place you can flash and restore and back up stuff, and think of FIGUI as a place you can flash stuff

Matt

So if I download CyanogenMod 7.1, can I just flash that zip file using this program?

John

I flashed the silver needle with GUI and it got me stuck in a boot loop, I have tried to restore both of my back ups and nothing has worked, any ideas on how i could fix this?

John

I meant I flashed the silverneedle kernel

John

Is there anyways to undo or override a kernel that was flashed through GUI? I flashed the silverneedle kernel and now my phone will only constantly boot the htc logo. I tried going into clockwork and restoring my back ups but none of them change the kernel and i tried flashing completly new roms with custom kernels and nothing changed, i even tried flashing kernels while in clockwork and nothing changed. Im all out of ideas and Im just wondering if there is anyway to fix this?

TypePad HTML Email
Push a different kernel to the phone, boot into recovery, clear cache and dalvik, reboot… you may be able to get it to boot without the aid of flashing a new kernel just by clearing Dalvik and cache though… Silverneedle was a good try, but it came out a long time ago and not much has been done on it last I checked..